Japanese Researchers Make Cooking Fun With New Simulator [+Movie]

By Latif Salman on 08/27/2012 11:14 PDT

Cooking is usually fun for those who’re good at it. However, often the novice cooks may wants to try their hands on a few delicacies in a test environment. What can be better than doing it in a virtual environment and gauging your cooking skills before venturing for the real deal?

Japanese researchers have made this possible by creating a cool cooking simulator. The simulator essentially brings together technology and cooking in a frying pan which is linked to a number of sensors. [movie in the full post]

All you have to do is hold the frying pan and move your hands just the way you do during real cooking. With the simulator you can stir the ingredients, flip over a piece of beef, even see the ingredients simmering in the pan. Once you are done cooking, you can even see its virtual outcome.

To create the simulator, the researchers made use of a projected display and a force feedback system. You are able to view the virtual ingredients and the whole process of virtual cooking project on a transparent screen right on top of the frying pan.

Apart from these simple tasks, the simulator can even tell you the moisture in your dish with the fluctuations in temperature. You can actually see the color of the ingredients change as you cook them over time.

This is probably the closest you can get to cooking without actually venturing into the kitchen. The simulator imitates the whole process fairly closely and it can turn out to be a great learning tools for aspiring chefs.